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London Menswear Spring/Summer 2013: Forever young

Day two of the inaugural London menswear collections and the buzzword is still youth. There is an air of revolution and urgency about the clothing on offer - as if each and every item on show is sticking two fingers up at traditional notions of how 'proper' men should dress. From the sportswear-meets-skater-chic styling, to the influx of raw edges, neon colours, and pair upon pair of shorts, London menswear is proving to be the city where men don't grow up. Contrast that with the austere suiting and booting that dominated the A/W runways of Milan's menswear giants, and it's easy to see why London's focus on fun is thriving.

Our designers are positioning themselves as the joyful, colourful - and most of all talented - enfants terribles of menswear. If Paris' sleek menswear symbolises the man you bring home to meet your parents, and Milan - with its trusty tailoring - is the man you marry, London is the beautiful, if ill-advised, boyfriend who got you into all kinds of unforgettable youthful scrapes.

The insuppressible juvenile energy we're seeing has nothing to do with the fact that the clothes are being shown on a virgin schedule - no, this playful, rebellious tone has been deliberatly culivated by the designers who are showcasing. Similar themes have popped up from runway to runway, from West Coast ease at Topman, Shaun Sampson and Katie Eary to the festival of colours at Sibling and Fashion East's Kit Neale. Elsewhere Christopher Shannon turned to hedonistic gap-yah backpackers (alongside English folklore) to offer up a strong showing of rag-doll-cum-scarecrow looks. Finally, not one to take his finger far from the pulse of the zeitgeist, Maarten Van Der Horst also went youth-happy, taking inspiration from teenage delinquents and heavy metal heads. Naughty.